Case Number 07762: Small Claims Court

THE REN AND STIMPY SHOW: SEASON FIVE AND SOME MORE OF FOUR

The Charge

"Maybe we can find another home that's not rotting?" -- Stimpy
(Billy West), "Aloha Höek"

The Case

I took it as a challenge to see who would crack first. Could my will endure
three discs' worth of this stuff? Would I need to prop open my eyes with
toothpicks to make it through? Perhaps I could make it. I had, after all,
endured the degenerating slide of the previous boxed set. And how much worse
could this one get?

And to think, I used to like Ren and Stimpy. Those original John K
cartoons still hold up pretty well. I don't care much for the shrill and
desperate Adult Cartoon Party work coming out now. (Or has that show been
cancelled already?) I don't care at all for the stuff I've seen from Games
Animation, who took over the explosive chihuahua and dimwitted cat after
Nickelodeon fired Spumco and asserted temporary sovereignty over the scruffy
animated critters for a few years. I gave up on the Nickelodeon incarnation of
The Ren and Stimpy Show only a few cartoons into the Games era. I stepped
back and tried to play fair with the second DVD boxed set, which collected the
third and half of the fourth seasons of the show, but as you may recall, I
was...disappointed. So it is difficult for me to approach The Ren and Stimpy
Show: Season Five and Some More of Four with anything less than creeping
unease.

I begin with the first disc of three. "Double Header" has decent
background paintings, but the character poses are unenthusiastic and lacking
weight. The performances by Billy West are phoned in, especially on Ren. There
is no emotional drive to the characters. The plot -- Ren and Stimpy are sewn
together after a bus accident -- does not take advantage of its premise to
create any memorable gags. Imagine what Spumco would have done with the idea of
Ren and Stimpy as circus freaks. Whatever you imagine is better than what Games
actually does with this dumbed-down cartoon. "The Scotsman in Space"
recycles gags from the classic "Space Madness," but badly. Then Alan
Young (better known as the voice of Scrooge McDuck) shows up as the voice of a
Scotsman babbling about sheep. Games tended to recycle voice actors capable of
only doing a single voice -- Alan Young, Jack Carter -- in cartoon after
cartoon.

I grit my teeth and keep going. In "Pixie King," Ren and Stimpy
are apprentice pixies looking to earn their wings by kissing dewdrops and other
stuff that doesn't make much sense. What exactly is the joke here? Then, in
"Aloha Höek," the two are stranded on an island and move into an
abandoned fish carcass. Dom DeLuise does a Brando impersonation as the "Big
Kahuna." At the end of the cartoon, Ren and Stimpy pull off their costumes
and reveal themselves to be Soviet spies. Um, uh. Huh? This was the best ending
they could come up with?

I tried to be fair. I tried to give the show a chance. But two episodes into
this first disc -- just four cartoons -- and I am on the verge of giving up and
just writing this review without watching the rest of the set. I am willing to
suffer a lot for the sake of you, the DVD Verdict audience, but my patience has
limits. Still, I press on.

It is one hour and six minutes into the first disc that I lose my cool. It
is enough that the character drawings are getting less detailed with each
cartoon, even in the formerly notorious "fleshy" close-ups. The color
palette is losing its shading in favor of flat, often conventional colors. The
gag writers are not even trying. But then -- wait -- is that a hair I see at the
top of the screen? Who is monitoring quality control on these discs? I haven't
seen a hair in the frame in years. This is Paramount, for heaven's sake! There
is another one a few minutes later, right in the middle of a cartoon with Ren
and Stimpy as prospectors looking for bleu cheese instead of gold. Was the
climax of that cartoon really a parody of "The Cask of Amontillado"? I
guess the lit majors in the room got it. Looking for technical flaws (and yes, I
know some of the John K cartoons on the first DVD set were not in perfect shape,
but they were funny enough for me to overlook the technical problems) was pretty
much the only thing that kept me going, at least until I could finish these
cartoons and get to the commentary tracks. I never thought I'd hear the end of
fart jokes. Oh God, I said "end" and "fart" in the same
sentence without even realizing it. Kill me now.

The last two seasons of Ren and Stimpy do have a funny joke here and
there. The gay subtext of the show is brought to the fore in "School
Mates," as Ren's old frat buddy insists his pal behave more like a
"dog" (which involves lots of beer and poker) and reject his fey
lifestyle with a cat. In "Terminal Stimpy," we see our favorite
hairball spitter confront his mortality following the grief stages of Elisabeth
Kubler-Ross. After a while, I found myself looking less at the cheap character
animation and more at the pretty background paintings. In their original Spumco
incarnations, Ren and Stimpy had dimensionality. There was verve and tension in
the drawing. There was charisma. But by their ignominious end, Ren and Stimpy
have become merely a collection of quirks that are inconsistent from episode to
episode.

As with the last DVD set, the saving grace of this package, if anything can
save it, is the commentary. The Spumco gang -- John Kricfalusi, Eddie
Fitzgerald, Richard Pursel, Jim Smith, Vince Waller, Eddie Bauza, and Mike
Pataki -- show up in various combinations over the course of five cartoons to
complain and repeat points you heard on earlier commentaries (the importance of
color and good backgrounds, how betrayed they felt by Bob Camp). By the final
track, "Terminal Stimpy," John is pretty much just interviewing his
old friend Mike "George Liquor" Pataki.

Meanwhile, Bill Wray and Scott Wills are offered the chance to speak for the
Games team on three tracks. At times, they try to be kind, but often they are
stuck talking about stuff they did not actually work on, calling some of the
results "desperate" and "non-expressive." I respect the
Spumco guys for extending a hand to these talented artists who got caught in the
middle of the mess. In the spirit of forgiveness, John K invites Bill Wray to
join him on four cartoons; background artist Scott Wills drops by for one as
well. Wray admits he "wasn't an innovator," but rather just a guy
trying to get the job done, and even he is embarrassed by some of the work done
by his Games compatriots. Wills talks mostly about color theory. In the midst of
all this Spumco vs. Games tension, Wray's conciliatory tone should remind us
that for most artists, art is a career, not a holy calling. John K is an
iconoclast, a perfectionist. Bill Wray, Scott Wills, and many others are just
trying to pay the bills.

One additional commentary track repeats the "Ren and Stimpy watch
Ren and Stimpy" shtick from the second set, with John K as Ren and
Eric Bauza as Stimpy. This time, they watch "Big Flakes" (the duo are
snowed in, run out of food, and get cabin fever), but since they have never seen
it before -- and John K is struggling not to rail against the shoddy treatment
of his characters -- Bauza pretty much carries the show.

The final stage of grief, according to Kubler-Ross, is acceptance. We have
seen the denial, as Spumco soldiers on in the belief that the cancelled Adult
Cartoon Party will somehow save Ren and Stimpy. We have seen the anger in
John K's bitter attacks on Bob Camp and the cartoon industry in general. We have
seen bargaining, as Paramount tries to convince audiences that these boxed sets
of Games episodes are worth buying just to hear the old master hold court. We
have seen depression: my face after watching these cartoons.

Now it is just time to put Ren and Stimpy to bed and accept that they
will never come back from The Big Sleep.